A hill with a hole. "Paper architecture" by Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin from the book Brodsky & Utkin: The Complete Works (Princeton Architectural Press, 2003).
The backward world
Recently in Shanghai, I saw many people walking backwards on the street and in the parks. As it turns out, they were following the footsteps of a mythic Chinese immortal, who could do it faster than the eye could see. In China, in addition to healthy exercise, walking backwards is also considered akin to a karmic reverse, allowing the walker to correct mistakes and sins of the past. But what is the world like in reverse?
All the time in the world
The weekend never ends in Berlin. There is no financial or social pressure to practice the everyday, so the outgoing Berliners work together to make the city more enjoyable, distorting time and typical etiquettes. In Berlin, a night out can stretch over days, weeks, and even years. As quantum physicists would say, probability is all we ever know about when it will come to an end.
Dream world
Last year, I read The Book of Scotlands, in which Nick Currie aka Momus uses negative space, or Ma in Japanese culture, to discover what his native country of Scotland could become through writing about everything except the place itself. Like the surrealists – or Soviet “Paper Architects” ignoring the boundaries of possibility and gravity in their 1980s designs – Momus recognizes the omnipotence of the imagined. “Every lie creates a parallel world; the world in which it is true,” he says.
The text was published as part of physics studies for the Science Poems book.
Written by
JENNA SUTELA